DOCSLIB.ORG

Contemporary Political Theory As an Anti-Enlightenment Project

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Contemporary Political Theory As an Anti-Enlightenment Project Dennis C. Rasmussen Brown University Contemporary Political Theory as an Anti-Enlightenment Project [NB: I am aware that the argument of this paper – that the majority of contemporary political theorists seek to dissociate themselves from the Enlightenment – isn’t actually much of an argument. I am currently beginning a book project that will seek to defend the Enlightenment (to some extent or another) from the attacks of its contemporary critics; the material gathered here includes part of the introduction and the introductions to each of the five substantive chapters, along with a few underdeveloped remarks at the beginning and end that seek to tie things together. In other words, this material wasn’t written as a stand-alone paper, so I apologize if it seems incomplete – it is! I also apologize for the length; for those who don’t have the time or desire to read it all, the main line of argument comes in the first 18 pages, with the rest fleshing out some details. I will, however, be eager to hear your thoughts about the charges I have outlined, and especially if I have missed any major critics or criticisms of the Enlightenment.] Like it or not, we are all children of the Enlightenment, utterly incapable of escaping the clutches of ideals and arguments put forth over two centuries ago. Or so, at least, many critics of the Enlightenment seem to believe. Michel Foucault claims, for instance, that the Enlightenment has largely determined “what we are, what we think, and what we do today,”1 and John Gray insists that “all schools of contemporary political thought are variations on the Enlightenment project.”2 There is, of course, something to such claims: given the number of values, practices, and institutions that we have inherited from the eighteenth century, it is difficult to imagine what our world would look like without its Enlightenment heritage. Yet it is remarkable how few political theorists still defend this heritage; in fact, I can think of few topics on which recent work in political theory has displayed greater consensus than on the conviction that the Enlightenment outlook is radically problematic. This paper will seek to show that the bulk of contemporary political theory, so far from being a series of “variations on the Enlightenment project,” can in fact be better described as a series of criticisms of that project. I will begin with a broad survey of the critics of the Enlightenment since World War II and then discuss in more detail what I take to be the five main criticisms leveled against the Enlightenment today: its belief in universal foundations, its overconfidence in reason, its enabling of oppression, its hostility to “the other,” 1 Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?”, trans. Catherine Porter, in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, vol. 1 of The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 303. 2 John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (New York: Routledge, 1995), viii; see also John Gray, Voltaire (New York: Routledge, 1999), 48. and its atomizing individualism. The Enlightenment’s Critics: An Overview The Enlightenment has been condemned almost since the moment of its inception. The earliest attacks came from the conservative and religious right (especially in Catholic France),3 although the most formidable of the Enlightenment‟s eighteenth-century opponents was surely Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the great critic of the arts and sciences, luxury and refinement, self- interest and cosmopolitanism.4 The initial wave of hostility toward the Enlightenment peaked in the wake of the French Revolution and the Terror, with figures such as Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, and J. G. Herder leading the charge in blaming the philosophes for their supposed radicalism, atheism, and absolutism. This hostility diminished somewhat in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as movements such as Romanticism, Idealism, utilitarianism, and historicism replaced the Enlightenment as the main focal point of theoretical concern, although thinkers from G. W. F. Hegel to Friedrich Nietzsche (at least in his “later period”) did take care to register their disagreements.5 Since World War II, however, opposition to the Enlightenment has surfaced with renewed vigor and from nearly every direction, uniting conservatives and liberals, pluralists and communitarians, postmodernists and religious fundamentalists; it is this more recent opposition to the Enlightenment with which I will be concerned in this paper. The rise and growth of contemporary opposition to the Enlightenment began when several scholars writing in the mid-twentieth century accused it of being the main cause of the most momentous problem the world was then facing: the emergence of totalitarianism. Perhaps the best-known such accusation came in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno‟s magnum opus, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Writing in the midst of the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust (although from the safe refuge of California), Horkheimer and Adorno sought to explain “why 3 See Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 4 See Graeme Garrard, Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment: A Republican Critique of the Philosophes (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003); Arthur Melzer, “The Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment: Rousseau and the New Religion of Sincerity” American Political Science Review 90.2 (1996): 344-60; and Dennis C. Rasmussen, The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society: Adam Smith’s Response to Rousseau (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, forthcoming 2008), chapter 1. 5 For a helpful survey of the opponents of the Enlightenment since eighteenth century, see Graeme Garrard, Counter- Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2006). 2 humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism,” and they found their culprit in the Enlightenment and “enlightenment thinking” more generally.6 The Enlightenment‟s “instrumental reason” inculcates an overwhelming concern for efficiency and gives people enormous power while at the same time undermining any objective basis for morality, they argue, and the ultimate result has been the death camps of the Third Reich. When Horkheimer and Adorno baldly state that “Enlightenment is totalitarian,”7 then, they mean that it leads (indirectly but inevitably) to fascism – an argument that has been repeated, in various forms, by a number of scholars since their time.8 Soon after the war ended, a number of Cold War liberals began to lay totalitarianism of the opposite kind at the Enlightenment‟s feet, blaming it for engendering not fascism but communism. Jacob Talmon, for instance, contended that the philosophes‟ rationalism led them to believe in the existence of a perfect, comprehensive, natural order in the world, and to see temporary coercion as justified for the sake of the harmonious, democratic, and free future that they believed would emerge once that order was realized.9 He argues that the Enlightenment gave birth to “totalitarian democracy,” the belief that true freedom can only be attained through collectivism and the extension of politics into every sphere of life – an outlook that he claims has been shared by all totalitarianisms of the left, from the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks. An even better-known argument along these lines was put forward by Isaiah Berlin, who contended that while the thinkers of the Enlightenment were supporters of freedom and opponents of intolerance in their own time, their rationalistic outlook ultimately led to terrible oppression. According to Berlin, the Enlightenment was “monist,” meaning that its proponents believed that the world and everything in it forms a systematic, coherent whole and is subject to a set of universal and eternal laws that are knowable 6 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1947] 2002), xiv. 7 Ibid., 4; see also 18. 8 For a number of different arguments that the Enlightenment bears a major responsibility for fascism in general and/or Nazism in particular, see Arthur Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews: The Origins of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Columbia University Press, [1968] 1990); George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1978); Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), chapter 7; and Lawrence Birken, Hitler as Philosophe: Remnants of the Enlightenment in National Socialism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995). 9 See Jacob L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: W. W. Norton, [1952] 1970), 1-4, 249-53. 3 by human beings.10 In his view, monism ineluctably leads to utopianism – the belief in and search for an ultimate solution to all human problems – and this is precisely what led to the Soviet gulags and other monstrosities of the twentieth century; in other words, Berlin sees totalitarianism as implicit even if dormant in Enlightenment thought. Talmon and Berlin were two of the earliest prominent figures to link the Enlightenment with communism, but this link has now become widely accepted among contemporary scholars.11
Load more

Recommended publications
  • CRITICAL THEORY and AUTHORITARIAN POPULISM Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism
    CDSMS EDITED BY JEREMIAH MORELOCK CRITICAL THEORY AND AUTHORITARIAN POPULISM Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism edited by Jeremiah Morelock Critical, Digital and Social Media Studies Series Editor: Christian Fuchs The peer-reviewed book series edited by Christian Fuchs publishes books that critically study the role of the internet and digital and social media in society. Titles analyse how power structures, digital capitalism, ideology and social struggles shape and are shaped by digital and social media. They use and develop critical theory discussing the political relevance and implications of studied topics. The series is a theoretical forum for in- ternet and social media research for books using methods and theories that challenge digital positivism; it also seeks to explore digital media ethics grounded in critical social theories and philosophy. Editorial Board Thomas Allmer, Mark Andrejevic, Miriyam Aouragh, Charles Brown, Eran Fisher, Peter Goodwin, Jonathan Hardy, Kylie Jarrett, Anastasia Kavada, Maria Michalis, Stefania Milan, Vincent Mosco, Jack Qiu, Jernej Amon Prodnik, Marisol Sandoval, Se- bastian Sevignani, Pieter Verdegem Published Critical Theory of Communication: New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet Christian Fuchs https://doi.org/10.16997/book1 Knowledge in the Age of Digital Capitalism: An Introduction to Cognitive Materialism Mariano Zukerfeld https://doi.org/10.16997/book3 Politicizing Digital Space: Theory, the Internet, and Renewing Democracy Trevor Garrison Smith https://doi.org/10.16997/book5 Capital, State, Empire: The New American Way of Digital Warfare Scott Timcke https://doi.org/10.16997/book6 The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism Edited by Marco Briziarelli and Emiliana Armano https://doi.org/10.16997/book11 The Big Data Agenda: Data Ethics and Critical Data Studies Annika Richterich https://doi.org/10.16997/book14 Social Capital Online: Alienation and Accumulation Kane X.
    [Show full text]
  • Nationalism in the French Revolution of 1789
    The University of Maine DigitalCommons@UMaine Honors College 5-2014 Nationalism in the French Revolution of 1789 Kiley Bickford University of Maine - Main Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/honors Part of the Cultural History Commons Recommended Citation Bickford, Kiley, "Nationalism in the French Revolution of 1789" (2014). Honors College. 147. https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/honors/147 This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UMaine. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors College by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UMaine. For more information, please contact [email protected]. NATIONALISM IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1789 by Kiley Bickford A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for a Degree with Honors (History) The Honors College University of Maine May 2014 Advisory Committee: Richard Blanke, Professor of History Alexander Grab, Adelaide & Alan Bird Professor of History Angela Haas, Visiting Assistant Professor of History Raymond Pelletier, Associate Professor of French, Emeritus Chris Mares, Director of the Intensive English Institute, Honors College Copyright 2014 by Kiley Bickford All rights reserved. Abstract The French Revolution of 1789 was instrumental in the emergence and growth of modern nationalism, the idea that a state should represent, and serve the interests of, a people, or "nation," that shares a common culture and history and feels as one. But national ideas, often with their source in the otherwise cosmopolitan world of the Enlightenment, were also an important cause of the Revolution itself. The rhetoric and documents of the Revolution demonstrate the importance of national ideas.
    [Show full text]
  • Renewing the Self
    Renewing the Self Renewing the Self: Contemporary Religious Perspectives Edited by Benjamin J. Wood Renewing the Self: Contemporary Religious Perspectives Edited by Benjamin J. Wood This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Benjamin J. Wood and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9885-6 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9885-0 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Individuality and Sociality in Christian Social Thought Jonathan Chaplin Section A: Historical Orientations Chapter One ............................................................................................... 10 The Canadian Red Tory Tradition: Individualism, Selfhood, Community and the Good Ron Dart Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 30 Autonomous Selves or Loved Others: A Theo-Political Perspective on the Individual Roger Haydon Mitchell Chapter Three
    [Show full text]
  • Confucian Marxism and Its Implications in the Current Age of Globalization
    CONFUCIAN MARXISM AND ITS IMPLICATIONS IN THE CURRENT AGE OF GLOBALIZATION Chen Weigang I. The Issue: Culture and Peripheral Justice One does not need to embrace Samuel Huntington’s theory of the clash of civilizations to recognize the increasing salience of cultural and ethnic confl ict in the post-Cold War world.1 Indeed, recent major trends in the developing world, from the spectacular growth of Islamic fundamentalism in Muslim countries to the rapid ascendancy of Confucian nationalism in East Asia,2 all demonstrate clearly that cul- ture and cultural identities have become the driving force in global politics today. How, then, do we explain the intriguing fact that precisely at the moment when the West scores a decisive victory over all political and economic alternatives, when capitalism is universally accepted as the only feasible way to rationally organize a modern economy, and when Third-World industrialization tears down the traditional North-South structure thereby marking the beginning of an age of capitalist global- ization, there has emerged across non-Western societies an ever more powerful anti-Western backlash and an ever stronger aspiration for 1 Huntington, Samuel, The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking of World Order (New York: Touchstone, 1996). 2 In 1993, Hanoi published, at great expense, a romanized Vietnamese translation (in fi fteen volumes with almost eight thousand pages) of “The Imperially Authorized Compendium of Institutions and Institutional Cases of the Great South” (“The Great South” was the Vietnamese imperial name for Vietnam, adopted in the late 1830s). The “Compendium of Institutions” had been compiled originally in classical Chinese by senior mandarins of the Vietnamese court at Hue in the 1840s.
    [Show full text]
  • 8. Erich Fromm's Social-Psychological
    RUDOLF SIEBERT 8. ERICH FROMM’S SOCIAL-PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF RELIGION Toward the X-Experience and the City of Being INTRODUCTION1 This essay explores Erich Fromm’s social-psychological theory of religion, as X- experience and longing for the City of Being, as being informed by the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, Meister Eckhart as well as Georg W.F Hegel, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. Its religious attitude constituted the very dynamic of Fromm’s writings, as well as of those of the other critical theorists of society, e.g. Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Leo Loewenthal, Herbert Marcuse, etc., It united them. It could only be expressed in poetical symbols: the X-experience; or the longing for the imageless, nameless, notionless utterly Other than the horror and terror of nature and history; or the yearning for perfect justice and unconditional love: that the murderer may not triumph over the innocent victim, at least not ultimately. Man begins to become man only with the awakening of this longing for the entirely Other, or the X-experience. This religious attitude aims as idology at the destruction of all idolatry. In the Near East –––––––––––––– 1 Editors’ note-The author’s use of Fromm’s concept of “x-experience” comes from this passage in his work: What we call the religious attitude is an x that is expressible only in poetic and visual symbols. This x experience has been articulated in various concepts which have varied in accordance with the social organization of a particular cultural period. In the Near East, x was expressed in the concept of a supreme tribal chief, or king, and thus „God” became the supreme concept of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which were rooted in the social structures of that area.
    [Show full text]
  • The Spirit of Transformational Politics: Human Nature, Communication, and Community
    THE SPIRIT OF TRANSFORMATIONAL POLITICS: HUMAN NATURE, COMMUNICATION, AND COMMUNITY Mary Elizabeth Domenico A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Communication Studies. Chapel Hill 2017 Approved by: Christian Lundberg William Balthrop Elizabeth Grosz Randall Styers Eric King Watts @ 2017 Mary Elizabeth Domenico ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Mary E. Domenico: The Spirit of Transformational Politics: Human Nature, Communication, and Community Under the Direction of Christian Lundberg This project in communication ethics explores the interrelations among views of human nature, theories of communicative action, and conceptualizations of the constitutive forces of community in Western thought. The central argument, that doctrines of human nature that include extra-material human capacities open avenues for rethinking contemporary political agency, is developed through a genealogy of doctrines of human nature intended to display how ideas of the self are historically configured and influential in thinking about human capacities. I begin with ancient Greek theories of a robust human spirit as portrayed by Homer, Plato, and Aristotle. The second cluster of theorists depicts the degradation of human spirit in religious (Augustine), philosophical (Descartes), and modern scientific doctrines. The third cluster addresses the recuperation of human spirit in the theories of Spinoza, Bergson, and Nancy. These genealogical clusters represent three distinct ways of viewing human nature and capacities for political agency. I challenge theories that presume ideational rationality and discourse are constitutive of community and reformulate the foundation of ethical community based on human spiritual capacities for knowledge beyond the empirical, the creation of new ways of relating to one another, and materializing our ontological connectedness.
    [Show full text]
  • Outline; Follow Them Very Carefully
    The University of Calgary Historical Studies (HTST) 201 (01) The History of Europe: EUROPE SINCE 1500 Winter 2017 Class times and location: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 9:00 - 9:50 a.m., ICT 121 Instructor: Brad Rennie Office: SS 615 E-mail: [email protected] Office hours: 10:00 - 10:40 a.m. or by appointment Course Description: This course examines major events and developments in European history since 1500, including the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, industrialization, social and political trends, colonialism and imperialism, key wars, totalitarianism, and globalization. It also considers the origins and impact of such events and developments and how they, along with related belief systems, shaped modern western civilization. Lectures will take most of the class time, though there will be some discussions and small-group exercises. Required Readings: Marvin Perry, Sources of the Western Tradition, Volume II: From the Renaissance to the Present, Ninth Edition (2014). Available in the Bookstore. The History Student's Handbook. Free at hist.ucalgary.ca – click on "Essay Guide" on the left. Optional Reading: Marvin Perry, Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1600, Eleventh Edition (2016). THIS BOOK IS ON ONE-HOUR RESERVE IN THE LIBRARY. Grading: Document analysis 15% Due February 6 Midterm 25% Two parts: Part one on February 15; part two on February 17 Research Paper 30% Due March 27 Final exam 30% Scheduled by the Registrar Exams: The exams will NOT be open book, but to help you prepare for the exams, I'll post in D2L an information sheet before each exam.
    [Show full text]
  • Lecture 10: Psychology of Probability: Predictable Irrationality
    Lecture 10: Psychology of probability: predictable irrationality. David Aldous October 5, 2017 Here are two extreme views of human rationality. (1) There is much evidence that people are not rational, in the economist's sense [maximization of expected utility (MEU)]. Some would argue we need descriptive economics; I would argue that all should be taught about probability, utility and MEU and act accordingly [Dennis Lindley, Understanding Uncertainty.] (2) You mentioned research which revealed that shoppers often prefer \50% extra free" to a notionally more generous 33% reduction in price, and you cited this as evidence of irrationality or poor mathematical ability on the part of consumers. Since all value is subjective, if people value 50% extra free more highly than 33% off, then that is an end of the matter. Whether or not the resulting behaviour conforms to some autistic neoclassical idea of rationality is irrelevant. [Rory Sutherland, Ogilvy & Mather UK. Letter to The Economist July 21 2012.] The 2011 best-seller Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel Prize winning Kahneman gives a wide-ranging and very non-technical account of human rationality and irrationality. The key point is that we're not arbitrarily irrational but that our intuition is \predictably irrational" (title of popular 2008 Ariely book) in ways one can describe. The part of this field relevant to STAT 157 concerns \decisions under uncertainty", which necessarily involves issues of probability and utility. Psychology research gets real data from real people, but the data mostly consists of subjects' answers to hypothetical limited explicit relevant data exam-style questions involving uncertainty.
    [Show full text]
  • Masses, Turbo-Capitalism and Power in Jean Baudrillard's Social
    International Journal of Theology, Philosophy and Science No. 3, Year 2/2018 MASSES, TURBO-CAPITALISM AND POWER IN JEAN BAUDRILLARD’S SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ONTOTHEOLOGY PhD. Prof. Spiros MAKRIS Assistant Professor in Political Theory University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, GREECE Email: [email protected] ABSTRACT If postmodern Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) could be defined as a theorist of power - to the extent that for some this is a contradiction by definition, although something very similar takes place in the case of Michel Foucault, he could be defined as a theorist of meta-power in the globalized era of turbo-capitalism. In his late texts (2005), which were published in 2010, the eminent French philosopher builds a provocative theory about power by using the classic concepts of domination and hegemony within the contemporary social, economic, political and ideological context of neoliberal globalization. In these papers, he analyzes in-depth the meta- power of hegemony in comparison with the power of domination. Actually, by signifying the critical passage of postwar capitalism from the phase of production to the phase of consumption, as Zygmunt Bauman does in his relevant work, Baudrillard formulates a meta-power theory as the equivalent of what he defines as turbo-capitalism. What is at stake is no longer the conventional issues of state sovereignty, Marx-inspired concept of alienation and Critical Theory-like negative dialectics but the crucial questions of hegemony, hostage and evilness. In short, Jean Baudrillard builds a new ontological and by extension disciplinary and theoretical field concerning global power, where the ‘Empire of Good’, or turbo-capitalism in his own terminology, is reborn in a totally catastrophic way (see simulation in the sense of a capitalist hypocrisy) either as an ‘Axis of Evil’ or as the ‘problem of terror’ (see simulacrum in the sense of a Lacanian stage of image within which turbo-capitalism represses, through a Freudian process of repelling, its unfamiliar self/i.e.
    [Show full text]
  • The Biological Basis of Human Irrationality
    DOCUMENT RESUME ED 119 041 CG 010 346 AUTHOR Ellis, Albert TITLE The Biological Basis of Human Irrationality. PUB DATE 31 Aug 75 NOTE 42p.; Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association (83rd, Chicago, Illinois, August 30-September 2, 1975) Reproduced from best copy available EDRS PRICE MF-$0.83 HC-$2.06 Plus Postage DESCRIPTORS *Behavioral Science Research; *Behavior Patterns; *Biological Influences; Individual Psychology; *Psychological Patterns; *Psychological Studies; Psychotherapy; Speeches IDENTIFIERS *Irrationality ABSTRACT If we define irrationality as thought, emotidn, or behavior that leads to self-defeating consequences or that significantly interferes with the survival and happiness of the organism, we find that literally hundreds of major irrationalities exist in all societies and in virtually all humans in those societies. These irrationalities persist despite people's conscious determination to change; many of them oppose almost all the teachings of the individuals who follow them; they persist among highly intelligent, educated, and relatively undisturbed individuals; when people give them up, they usually replace them with other, sometimes just as extreme, irrationalities; people who strongly oppose them in principle nonetheless perpetuate them in practice; sharp insight into them or their origin hardly removes them; many of them appear to stem from autistic invention; they often seem to flow from deepseated and almost ineradicable tendencies toward human fallibility, overgeneralization, wishful thinking, gullibility, prejudice, and short-range hedonism; and they appear at least in part tied up with physiological, hereditary, and constitutional processes. Although we can as yet make no certain or unqualified claim for the biological basis of human irrationality, such a claim now has enough evidence behind it to merit serious consideration.
    [Show full text]
  • The World from Neo-Liberal Globalization to Neo-Populist Ethno-Nationalism: from the Law of Nature to the Law of Nurture
    Journal of International Politics Volume 2, Issue 3, 2020, PP 30-38 ISSN 2642-8245 The World from Neo-Liberal Globalization to Neo-Populist Ethno-Nationalism: From the Law of Nature to the Law of Nurture Sibuh Gebeyaw Tareke* Department of Political Science and International Studies, Bahir Dar University, Bahir Dar, Ethiopia *Corresponding Author: Sibuh Gebeyaw Tareke, Department of Political Science and International Studies, Bahir Dar University, Bahir Dar, Ethiopia. ABSTRACT Neoliberalism arose from classical liberalism, which was believed in individual liberty, equal opportunity, and private property should administer by individual ‘law of nature’ while the ‘law of state’ regarded as a ‘necessary evil’. When neoliberalism had emerged in 1970s, it replaced the theories of Keynesianism, which targeted state regulation on the economic policy; towards a more ‘monetarist’ individual self-regulating and ‘market law’ approach. This “Individual against all” approach of neoliberalism led the mass to live like slaves in slavery age and peasants in feudalism. Then economic crises aggravated and the ‘law of identity’ emerged or neoliberalism shifted towards all against all approaches of neo-populism. This paper explores the neoliberal law of the individual over the mass and its practical failure; next it discusses all against all laws of neo-populism and its threats. In the end, it provides the missing laws of both the ‘neo-neo’ approaches as a solution anda concluding remark. Keywords: Neo-liberalism; Neo-populism; Law-of-Nature; Law-of-market; Law-of-State; Law-of-Nurture INTRODUCTION revolutionary to modern liberalism-the trend towards big government and state intervention The private ownership of the means of production (law of the state) that had characterized much of was introduced as a distinct movement in the the twentieth century.
    [Show full text]
  • Post-Politics and the Aesthetic Imagination,” Edited Collection (DEADLINE: MAY 20)
    H-Democracy CFP: “Post-Politics and the Aesthetic Imagination,” Edited Collection (DEADLINE: MAY 20) Discussion published by Juan Meneses on Sunday, May 16, 2021 “Post-Politics and the Aesthetic Imagination” CFP for Edited Collection This Call for Papers seeks abstracts for essays that reflect on the analytical bridges that might exist between post-political theory and the study of aesthetics broadly conceived. The main question the project aims to answer is the following: Decades after everything was declared to be political, what are the affordances, triumphs, and pitfalls of a post-political theory of aesthetics? The work of theorists of post-politics such as Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Erik Swyngedouw among others has exposed the processes by which political action is currently being eroded, sites for its practice are increasingly disappearing, and political agency is in need of urgent revitalization. At the same time, much post-political critical discourse has concentrated on connecting the saturation of the practice of politics, as well as its subsequent evacuation, with the need to formulate new and alternative ways to generate meaningful political change. While post-political theory has featured in analyses traditionally labelled “political,” a more explicit reflection on the contours, scope, and interpretive value of post- political theory for the study of aesthetics is absent in the critical theory corpus and it can offer a crucial contribution. At the core are questions: What does the post- political stand for exactly, and how can issues concerning representation (textual, visual, aural, etc. as well as political) be rethought through this lens? Related Citation: Juan Meneses.
    [Show full text]